Page 58

“That’s different. It doesn’t have eyes. You’re okay with eating the head, and brain, of a calf?”

“Non. It’s disgusting. But the French like it.”

Reine-Marie and Armand understood the slightly tortured point Jean-Guy was making.

“I wonder what the cologne is,” Reine-Marie said, and thanked the waiter, who’d just brought her a pot of tea, already steeped.

She poured a cup and looked out the window, across the park, to the huge department store on rue de Sèvres.

Picking up her cup, she noticed a line down the side and a drip.

“It’s leaking,” she said, putting it back down.

“A lane to the land of the dead,” said Jean-Guy, to the astonishment of the Gamaches.

“What did you just say?” Reine-Marie asked.

“Sorry. Part of a poem, I think. I heard it recently. Can’t remember where. Oh, right. We were flying to the Maldives—”

Since Annie wasn’t there to moan, Reine-Marie did.

“—and Carole Gossette said it.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.”

“Why would she say that?” asked Reine-Marie.

“I’m beginning to wonder,” said Jean-Guy.

Turning to Armand, Reine-Marie said, “You do suspect Claude, don’t you. If you didn’t, you’d give him everything.”

“Pardon?” said Jean-Guy.

Armand reached into his jacket and brought out Stephen’s slender agenda. “I haven’t had a chance to go through it yet.”

“While you do, I’m going shopping.” Reine-Marie got up.

“Now?” asked Jean-Guy.

“Now.”

“But your lunch?” said her son-in-law.

“Save it for me, please,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll be long.”

She was wrong.

Reine-Marie paused in the sun-filled atrium of Le Bon Marché department store. It hadn’t changed. The bright and airy space was an unlikely and perfect confluence of commerce and beauty. And now, with the passage of time, history.

Le Bon Marché was the oldest, the first, store of its kind in Paris. Practically in the world. Opened in 1852, it predated Selfridges in London by more than half a century.

In fact, the Hôtel Lutetia was built by the owner of Le Bon Marché, primarily to give his customers someplace to stay while spending money in his remarkable store.

He was a visionary. What he saw was wealth. What he could not have envisioned were the other uses his magnificent hotel would be put to.

As children, Daniel and Annie had loved nothing better than to ride up and down the famous white-tiled escalators, looking out over the wares, the people, gawking at the huge installations that were as much art as marketing. They’d visit the toy department, the bonbons department, before returning to the Lutetia for a hot chocolate.

This near-perfect commercial creation was filled with happy memories.

But not today.